


walk beside me

by renecdote



Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Episode Tag, Episode: s03e18 Shades of Grey, Fix-It, Friendship, Gen, Guilt, Team Feels
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-28
Updated: 2021-02-28
Packaged: 2021-03-19 08:15:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,736
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29747610
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/renecdote/pseuds/renecdote
Summary: “It wasn’t personal,” Jack says.Daniel’s smile is tight. “I know,” he says.Jack thinks: do you?He thinks: except for how it kind of was.A post episode fix-it for Shades of Grey.
Relationships: Daniel Jackson & Jack O'Neill
Comments: 6
Kudos: 35





	walk beside me

**Author's Note:**

  * For [areth_lovejoy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/areth_lovejoy/gifts).



> Written as a thank you for @brambleberrycottage for their donation to help out a friend in need. More info can be found on my [tumblr](https://renecdote.tumblr.com/post/633263088973512704/donation-fics).
> 
> Title from a quote by Albert Camus: _Don’t walk in front of me… I may not follow. Don’t walk behind me… I may not lead. Walk beside me… just be my friend._

There is a moment—a few of them actually—where he thinks Daniel is going to call his bluff. He’s going to call bullshit, lay Jack open for the world to see, pull sources on the layers of friendship he has wormed his way into over the years. He’s going to show that he knows Jack; that he knows this isn’t him.

The house is bugged. Jack has to remind himself: the house is bugged. If Daniel calls bullshit, this whole plan could go to hell in a hand basket faster than—well, faster than a trip through an intragalactic wormhole. So Jack—he gets mean. Nasty. He cuts through the roundabout argument about morals and goals and he goes right for Daniel’s throat, right for the part of him that he knows will hurt.

“I guess you couldn’t relate to me anymore than I could to you.”

And:

“So this whole, uh, this whole friendship thing we’ve been working on for the last few years—”

“Apparently not much of a foundation there, huh?”

Daniel leaves.

Jack tells himself he didn’t have a choice. It was the only thing to do. He’ll fix it later, apologise, tell Daniel he didn’t mean it, that their friendship is solid. He’ll save the day and then—then he’ll make it right.

(“It’s good to have you back, sir,” Carter says.

“Indeed,” Teal’c agrees.

Daniel doesn’t say anything.)

He does apologise. And Daniel tells him it’s fine, he understands, he doesn’t have to—

“I do appreciate that you were the one that came to see if I was okay,” Jack tells him. “That…that means something.”

And Daniel says: “Actually, no it doesn’t.”

Daniel says: “We drew straws. I lost.”

Carter says, later: “I rigged it. The straws. I thought—I mean, if anyone could have talked you out of it—”

She’s right. She knows she’s right. She knows _him_.

Jack isn’t sure how that makes him feel.

(Happy, maybe.)

It’s an underwhelming conclusion to one of the more stressful weeks Jack has had in a while. He doesn’t like lying to his team. He especially doesn’t like lying to Daniel. It’s an unsettling realisation; maybe more unsettling because he’s known it for a while, he just didn’t want to admit it to himself.

“They are your friends,” Thor said to him, when they were all sitting down hashing out the plan. “Will you be able to deceive them?”

Jack looked Thor right in the eye and said, “It won’t be a problem.”

(If there is anything this latest assignment has taught him, it’s that he’s really good at lying. Even to himself.)

General Hammond stands SG-1 down for seventy-two hours. Jack spends the first three of those hours in a brutal debriefing, going over everything that happened so many times it makes his head spin. He scribbles a jet on the corner of a notepad, a series of stick figures, a wobbly circle that sort-of-not-really looks like the Stargate. The Tollans thank him. The Asgards thank him. General Hammond waits until they’re all gone, then says, “Good work, Jack, get some rest.”

Jack’s “thank you, sir” is automatic. Hammond stops him with a few more words before he can walk out the door.

“Oh, and I suggest a little team bonding before you’re all back on the roster for gate travel. I don’t want any problems with my best team.”

“Yes, sir,” Jack agrees.

But when he leaves the conference room, it isn’t his team he seeks out. The first person he goes to see is Colonel Makepeace, resting uncomfortably in a holding cell while transport is organised to take all the prisoners off base. Makepeace sneers at him, his laugh mean. “You know, it’s funny,” he says. “The famous Colonel O’Neill—the famous SG-1—greatest leader of the greatest team, and they don’t even trust you.”

It stings. Jack pretends that it doesn’t.

“You think I’m lying?” Makepeace goes on, gleeful and taunting. “They were my team for a week, you think they didn’t tell me things? Carter—well, you know Carter, she won’t break an order even if it kills her. A proper soldier, that one, she has respect for the chain of command. And the Jaffa—he doesn’t say much. But Doctor Jackson?” Makepeace is an asshole. “Doctor Jackson couldn’t wait to tell me how much he doesn’t trust you.”

He’s just trying to get under his skin; Jack doesn’t need Daniel’s measured voice or restraining hand to tell him that.

“You’re a piece of work, Maypeace,” he says anyway; doesn’t care that it just makes the asshole’s grin widen. “You don’t know anything about my team.”

He’s not sure what exactly he was expecting to get out of a conversation with the traitorous bastard, but he’s pretty sure he didn’t get it. Instead all he leaves with is… doubt. Uncertainty.

(Guilt.)

When Jack went through the Air Force Academy, trust wasn’t something you learned, it was just something you were expected to have; something you were expected to make yourself worthy of. Trust your team. Trust your fellow soldiers to have your back. Show them that they can trust you too. Jack always found it easier to be trusted than to trust. Call him paranoid, call him a suspicious bastard, hell, call him insubordinate—his commanding officers sure did, on more than one occasion—it doesn’t much matter why. He’s just never been good at the whole trusting thing.

But Daniel, Carter, Teal’c—Jack trusts his team. He knows they trust him.

Or, at least, he thought they did.

“Are you even listening?” Daniel’s voice breaks over him. His hand waves in front of Jack’s face. “Hello? Earth to Jack? You could at least pretend to listen, you know.”

“I’m listening,” Jack says immediately. Then he blinks and shakes his head. “No, I wasn’t. Sorry. You were saying?”

Whatever Daniel was saying doesn’t get said. He keeps frowning at Jack, doing that thing he does where he tries to figure out what’s wrong before he asks. Jack has always wondered whether that’s an anthropologist thing or just a Daniel thing. He doesn’t know many anthropologists. Maybe it’s just a Daniel thing.

“You’ve been weird since you got back,” Daniel says, careful with his words, less like he’s walking on eggshells and more like he’s carefully stepping around them.

“Have I?”

Daniel frowns. They both know he has.

“You know, uh, you did a pretty impressive job.” Daniel ducks his head, pushes his glasses back up to sit properly on his nose; a casual avoidance tactic. “With the acting, I mean. The whole….” A swirling hand gesture. “Scam.”

He used that word before too. Scam (noun): a fraudulent or deceptive act or operation. Definition two (verb): to deceive and defraud (someone). Jack gets the feeling Daniel means it in the second sense. It feels more… personal. Scam: to deceive and defraud (Daniel).

“I was just following orders,” he says. It feels hollow. From the look on Daniel’s face, it sounds pretty hollow too.

“Sure,” he says. There is a stack of books in front of him; Daniel flips one of them open, aimless but determined in the way he flicks through it like it has some key piece of information he desperately needs to find. It’s a book about quantum mechanics; Sam probably left it in here; Jack is pretty sure Daniel doesn’t understand more than ten words of the dense mathematical text.

“It wasn’t personal,” Jack says.

Daniel’s smile is tight. “I know,” he says.

Jack thinks: _do you?_

He thinks: _except for how it kind of was._

He clears his throat and says, “Good. So we’re—we’re good.”

He can’t bring himself to make it a question. Daniel nods anyway.

“Yeah. We’re good.”

Seventy-two hours pass, but it’s another two days before Hammond is calling SG-1 into his office to give them a new off-world assignment. P3X-271; atmosphere is breathable, plant life looks similar to earth, no signs of hostiles or any other kind of civilisation.

“You know the drill,” Hammond says. “Check it out, collect samples, report back.”

“Is it weird that I’ve missed the boring parts of this job?” Jack asks afterwards, when they’re in the gate room, double checking gear before stepping through the wormhole. “Five days on base and soil samples have never sounded so exciting.”

“We’re going to another planet,” Daniel says. “I’d hardly call that boring.”

Daniel’s retorts are often dry, but this one is almost—short. Snippy. Jack raises an eyebrow at Carter and gets a shrug in response. Teal’c’s head tilt is equally as clueless. Jack is opening his mouth to ask if he woke up on the wrong side of the bed that morning when the sound of the gate locking into the final chevron interrupts them. Jack feels the _whoosh_ of the wormhole opening singing through his veins. It’s always a rush, even after several years.

“Shall we?” he says, sweeping his arm toward the gate.

Daniel steps forward first, Carter and Teal’c following. Jack pointedly doesn’t think about the symbolism of not leading his team through the gate. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s just Makepeace’s grating voice getting under his skin. They’re fine. They’re good. This mission will just prove that.

P3X-271 is humid. Jack grimaces at the way his uniform sticks to his skin, hot and heavy even under the cover of shade. Teal’c is at the front of their straggling line, Daniel and Carter behind him, while Jack brings up the rear, gun held loosely in his hands because even on an uninhabited planet you can never be too careful. It’s slow but steady going through the trees, following a path that Jack is no longer sure is actually a path.

He’s just opening his mouth to suggest they head back, get what they came for closer to the gate, when Daniel stops in the middle of the path, head cocked as he listens. “Did you hear that?”

Jack exchanges a look with Carter, then Teal’c. “Hear what?”

The forest around them is alive with the sound of chattering birds and the whisper of leaves in the breeze, but not much else. Daniel is frowning into the tress around them, spinning a slow circle as he looks for whatever it was that caught his attention.

“I could have sworn I heard a baby crying.”

Jack’s eyebrows rise with his incredulity. “A human baby?”

It gets him a dark look. Daniel doesn’t need to say anything for Jack to hear _yes, Jack, obviously a human baby_. He holds up his hands in peace, even as he says, “I thought this place was uninhabited.”

“It is,” Carter says. “Well, it’s supposed to be. The MALP—”

She doesn’t get the chance to finish before Daniel is breaking away, jogging through the trees.

“Daniel!” Jack calls to his retreating back. “Dammit, Daniel, what are you—”

The trees spit them out onto a riverbank. It’s all wide, flat, sun-warmed rock with only a few scraggly bits of green growing through the cracks. The river is clear, difficult to tell how deep, the glint of silver fish weaving through the current. About a hundred yards further down, it opens up into a wide pool, the kind of place Jack might seek out to go fishing back on Earth, with plenty of space to sit a deck chair and a cooler of beer at the edge of the water. Daniel doesn’t seem to absorb any of the beauty as he spins around, almost wild in the way he searches the landscape. Jack pauses, looking around himself, but there is nothing to see. Nothing to hear, either, except the quiet rush of the river.

“No baby,” he notes.

“I know what I heard, Jack.”

“Maybe it was a bird,” offers Carter.

Teal’c, good intentioned but unhelpful, throws in, “I did not hear any such bird.”

Jack watches Daniel. He wonders if this is something he should be concerned about. Is hearing phantom babies crying a sign of some underlying medical issue? He shakes his head. It was probably a bird, or any other number of weird alien noises.

After a few more minutes of nothing happening, he says, “Let’s keep moving.”

“No.” Daniel digs in his heels. “We should—we should check the area, make sure there isn’t anybody here.”

“There _isn’t_ anybody here.”

“Sir.” Carter, ever the peacemaker. “Maybe we should check. Just in case.”

Jack throws up his hands. “Fine, we’ll check the area. But be quick about it, we’re wasting daylight.”

There is no sign of a baby—or person of any other age, other than them. All their search does is take them further from the stargate.

When the humidity breaks, it’s with a storm that rolls in out of nowhere, drenching them all with rain so heavy it stings. Clouds hang low and angry, crackling with flashes of lightning and loud, rolling waves of thunder. There is always something a little strange about a storm on another planet. The ways they are different; the ways they are exactly the same. There are literal aliens out there—aliens with bigass spaceships and a penchant for conquest—but somehow it is weather that makes Jack feel small and insignificant in the universe.

They find shelter under a wide rocky overhang carved out of a towering cliff. The word _cave_ feels too generous for the recessed space, walled on only two and a half sides, but it’s better than being stuck out in the rain. Jack starts a fire with the few dry sticks they can gather and Teal’c stacks up more wood to dry out while Carter and Daniel set up the makeshift camp. They’re practiced at this, tasks completed almost in silence, communication not so much wordless as unnecessary. When they settle, Teal’c is on watch at the entrance, Jack and Carter are making coffee by the fire, and Daniel sits with his back against the wall, journal balanced on his knee as he writes. The flickering shadows from the firelight make his frown look more severe.

“You know,” Carter says, voice quiet beside him, for Jack’s ears only. “After that mission on P7J-989—with the Keeper who trapped us in that virtual recreation of our memories—Daniel and I talked. He told me that the worst part wasn’t that he couldn’t save his parents, it was that even if he did, it wouldn’t be real. It was all just one big lie, the worst day of his life twisted into some kind of morbid entertainment for others.”

Jack pokes at the fire; it pops and hisses in protest. “What’s your point, Carter?”

“You lied to him.”

“I lied to all of you."

Carter’s lips twitch in a way that is more disbelieving than smile. “You know it’s different.”

“Because you forgave me?” Jack asks, needling, more bite in the words than he intends there to be. So maybe it hurts more than he wants to admit, knowing Daniel is upset with him, knowing he was the one who hurt him and not knowing how to fix it.

“Because we didn’t have any reason not to.”

Daniel’s focus is still on his journal.

“I told him I didn’t mean it,” Jack says.

“Yeah,” Carter agrees. She pours two sachets of terrible MRE coffee into mugs and passes them both over, then nods in Daniel’s direction. “Maybe what you need to do is show him.”

Jack holds both coffees, staring down into them for a long moment before he stands. Carter’s smile is encouraging, maybe even a touch relieved, and Jack lets it bolster him as he heads over to the wall where Daniel is sitting.

“Here.”

He holds out a mug. There are several long seconds where he thinks Daniel isn’t going to take it, before a hand wraps around it with a murmured, “Thanks.”

The journal gets closed, pen still inside, then tucked under Daniel’s leg on the dusty ground. Jack has the momentarily absurd feeling that he’s being written about, but he shakes it away and sits down on the ground, so close that their shoulders almost touch. There is a flash of purple lightning and, several seconds later, the low rumble of thunder through the air.

It’s strange to not know what Daniel is thinking. A month ago they were literally in each other’s heads, connected by the impulses of an alien device called Urgo. Jack remembers sitting in the commissary, setting out a mountain of desserts around four spots at the table—choosing to sit at that table, with room for three more even when it was just him—knowing that his team would join him. It was spurred by alien technology, but it was also—knowing. Knowing his team. Knowing how they work and think and act. Knowing _them_.

He remembers the conversation with Daniel after he was (not really) fired. He remembers laying all the seeds before that, knowing what answers would satisfy Daniel and what answers would push him away.

He remembers the hurt on Daniel’s face. The way he shut it down, cut off emotions and Jack in one painful blink.

_I guess you couldn’t relate to me any more than I could to you._

_So this whole, ah, this whole friendship thing we’ve been working on in the last few years is…_

_Apparently not much of a foundation there, huh?_

Jack remembers other things too. Daniel’s favourite colour, and his fear of heights, and whispered confessions in the middle of the night about how he was never really good at making friends. He was always too awkward or shy or too absorbed in his research. And then along came the Stargate. Sha’re. Stargate again. SG-1.

Jack remembers all the hours they spent getting to know each other. Sitting on hot sand under an even hotter sun; sheltered under trees so like and yet so different from Earth; sequestered in the cluttered office Daniel has on base; drinking beers in Jack’s living room. Jack likes to think he knows all his teammates pretty well, but he knows Daniel the best.

And that works both ways. Daniel knows him. _Really_ knows him. He knows Jack was ready to die on Abydos. He knows Stargate gave him a purpose, even when he didn’t want one. He knows he minored in English Lit . He knows his father was an alcoholic and his mother tried her best but always seemed a little absent. He knows what it’s like to be loved but still have to raise yourself.

Daniel is his friend. Jack... he doesn’t have many of those. He definitely doesn’t have anyone else he’d maybe, possibly, call a best friend. The list of people he considers family is short. Like, microscopically short. But Daniel—Carter and Teal’c, too, but Daniel—

“I’m sorry,” Jack says.

Daniel looks at him over his coffee, curious and a little wary. “For what?”

“Not believing you, about the baby.”

Daniel’s gaze slides away, settling on the shadows dancing on the floor. “Yeah, well, you were right. No baby.”

Jack feels like he’s stumbling blind, not sure where exactly this conversation is going or how to get there. _Sorry_ was about all he had and he’s already used that up.

“I trust you.” The words come from somewhere deep and honest and not entirely within Jack’s control. He feels like he’s fumbling them, the conversation slipping through his grasp, and he just has to keep going or it’s going to sweep him off his feet. “I know you probably think I don’t, after the—the whole scam thing. And I know you have no reason to trust me, but—I want you to know that. That it was never about that.”

“You were just doing your job.” Daniel’s voice is hollow; more painful than if it had been bitter. “I know. You said that.”

_But you still haven’t forgiven me._

Jack hears Carter’s voice in his head: _we didn’t have any reason not to_. And: _you lied to him._

And Daniel, days ago: _you know, uh, you did a pretty impressive job. With the acting, I mean._

Jack feels like an idiot. All the pieces have been there, he’s just been trying to put them together in the wrong order. Maybe it was Makepeace’s words getting under his skin, or maybe he’s been so focused on the way Daniel said _you didn’t think you could trust us to help?_ instead of the way he stumbled through his agreement when Jack said _obviously the whole friendship thing, the foundation, it’s all solid_. But maybe… it isn’t obvious?

Maybe Jack is an ass as well as an idiot.

“I lied to you,” he says.

Daniel’s eyebrows go up, almost incredulous, then just as quickly flatten into quickly-hidden hurt. “Thanks. That really makes me feel better.”

“No.” Jack shakes his head. “No, I mean—I lied to you. When you came to the house, when I told you we weren’t friends. None of that was true. I said what I knew would make you leave, but I didn’t mean any of it.”

“Jack, we don’t have to…”

He said that last time too. But Jack is paying attention this time, so he’s pretty confident when he says, “I think we do.”

The look Daniel gives him is considering, maybe even surpirsed. “You know, this feels like a weird role reversal, you being the one who wants to talk something out.”

He’s got a point; usually talking is Daniel’s thing. But—

“I can talk when it matters,” Jacks says. _You matter. Us—this friendship—that matters._

Daniel shifts, settling more comfortably on the hard ground. “Okay,” he says after a moment. “Let’s talk.”

Carter and Teal’c are sitting together on the opposite side of the not-quite-cave now. The distance isn’t great, but it’s enough to make it clear that they’re giving Jack and Daniel privacy. With the storm raging loud overhead, their conversation is muffled, the words kept just between them. The only bugs that might be listening in are the ones scuttling across the ground.

Jack knows that one conversation isn’t going to be an instant fix, but—it’s a start. It’s a foundation. Everything else can be built up brick by brick until they get back to where they were. Daniel won’t have a reason to doubt their friendship again; Jack is going to make sure of it.


End file.
